FAQ

What is the license key?

Anyone can download and install Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd for free.

To run, BEL requires a valid license key. You can get a license key for free from the Buoyant portal.

What kind of BEL usage is allowed for free?

If your company has fewer than 50 employees: You can run BEL for free, including for production use, regardless of environment, scale, or type of usage. This includes full access to all features available in standard (non-FIPS) downloads of BEL. It does not include access to support.

If your company has 50 employees or more: You can evaluate BEL in non-production environments. However, running BEL in production environments requires a paid license covering both production and non-production environments. See BEL Plans and Pricing.

What constitutes “production use”?

“Production use” includes handling any traffic from your customers, or handling any traffic that is directly tied to revenue or otherwise critical to the business.

What are stable releases?

Buoyant is the creator and maintainer of Linkerd, which is an open source project hosted on GitHub. As part of this work, we publish two types of Linkerd packages:

Open source edge releases. These contain the latest code from the main branch at the point in time when they were cut. These have the latest features and bugfixes, but don’t provide any guarantees around upgrades. Upgrading between edge releases may involve breaking changes, and may involve partial features that are later modified or backed out.

BEL stable releases. These are designed to introduce minimal change to an existing system, by minimizing the overall delta between releases and ensuring that upgrades and rollbacks between point releases are safe and contain no breaking changes. BEL releases also contain additional features not available in open source.

See our Versions, Platforms, and Deprecation doc for details on BEL semantic versioning, supported platforms, and more.